The Roman citizenship

Roman citizenship was that status whereby a person enjoyed the rights and was subject to the duties of the Roman ius civile. In the republican period, as Rome's power and influence grew, Roman citizenship became highly valued, was sought after by many and was granted sparingly.

From the early years of the Principate the citizenship was granted with increasing frequency to individuals or whole communities, often following the concession of the ius Latii (the intermediate legal status between citizen and foreigner given to members of Latin colonies). By granting the Roman citizenship to more and more inhabitants of the empire the emperors sought to secure the loyalty of the provincial upper classes and, at the same time, to establish islands of Roman civilisation in the provinces.^[882] Persons who did not belong to organised communities (peregrini dediticii) and who thus lacked citizenship (nullius civitatis) could also acquire Roman citizenship but only after they had formally been admitted as citizens of another state.^[883] Those persons to whom citizenship was granted were not required to abandon the citizenship which they had previously held.^[884] Thus newly admitted Roman citizens were not released from their civic duties towards the communities to which they originally belonged.^[885] The gradual extension of the citizenship precipitated the process of Romanisation of the provinces, especially those of the West, the decline of the old concept of the city-state and the gradual levelling of the inhabitants of the empire with respect to their legal and political rights.^[886]

The constitutio Antoniniana

The process of Romanisation of the empire was completed in 212 AD when Emperor Caracalla issued an edict, the constitutio Antoniniana, by which he bestowed Roman citizenship upon all the free inhabitants of the empire who were members of organised communities.^[887] According to Dio Cassius, one of the main reasons behind the introduction of this measure was the emperor's desire to increase the numbers of those who had to pay inheritance tax (vicesima hereditatum/^[888] [889] and the tax levied upon the emancipation of slaves (vicesima libertatis or vicessima manumissionum/* - taxes which only Roman citizens were required to pay.^[890] It has also been suggested that the enactment of this law may also have been motivated by Caracalla's desire to mitigate public reaction to the assassination, ordered by him, of his brother Geta and the influential jurist and praefectus praetorio Papinian. But, whatever the emperor's motives may have been, the enactment of the constitutio Antoniniana can be seen as the final step in the long process of Romanisation of the empire and the realisation of political and legal unity within its borders.

With the enactment of the constitutio Antoniniana Roman law was extended to the whole empire. Although the government was slow in enforcing this change, local differences gradually disappeared and the law of the empire became uniform. However, in this process of universalisation of the law, Roman law was in many ways adapted to and influenced by local laws and customs. As a result, the common law that finally emerged was in reality a mixture of Roman law and local systems and thus very different in character from the Roman law of the pre-classical and early classical periods.